academic work

I'm an ethnomusicologist specializing in digital audio recording cultures and the production of contemporary music in Istanbul, Turkey. My book
Music in Turkey: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture was published by Oxford University press.
I teach ethnomusicology, popular music studies and sound studies at the University of Birmingham (UK); before that I was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities, and taught at the University of Maryland, College Park.

I've done ethnographic research on recording studios in Turkey, musical instruments, studio architecture, glitch aesthetics in darkwave music, and on distributed recording production. Along with Graham St. John, I co-founded the dancecult.net collaborative bibliography project and the open source, peer-reviewed journal entitled Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. You can find some of my publications here...

performances and musical activity

I'm a performer and recording artist of the 11-stringed oud (al-ud, 'ûd), and also do a lot of recording studio-based audio engineering and arrangement work.

I relish bringing the oud into unfamiliar circumstances ---
... on stage with the unpredictable (but always delightful) Hammond organ of Baby Dee as
The Big Bumble Bees
and to the gnostic hallucinatory worlds of David Tibet and the family of Current 93
... as an interface to space-age electroacoustic soundscapes in my solo work as Kaderci
and in the flamenco-hindustani-dub reggae fusion universe of Basquerole (with Dan Fries).

I also continue to perform Anatolian folk music, rebetika, and other musics from the Middle East.